Teaching Lopate worked as a writer-in-the-schools for twelve years and his memoir
Being With Children came out of his association with the artists-in-the-school organization
Teachers & Writers Collaborative. Lopate coordinated T&W's first project (at Manhattan's P.S. 75), the model for which led to similar programs in all 50 states. He has taught creative writing and literature to undergraduate and graduate students at several institutions, including
Bennington College,
Fordham University,
Cooper Union, the
University of Houston,
New York University (NYU),
Columbia University School of the Arts, and
The New School. He is currently professor of Writing at
Columbia University. He held the Adams Chair at
Hofstra University until 2011, where he was professor of English. He retired from Columbia University in 2023.
Creative writing Lopate's essays, fiction, and poetry have appeared in several
Pushcart Prize annuals, the anthologies
Congregation and
Testimony, and
The Paris Review, ''
Harper's Magazine, Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, Harvard Educational Review, The New York Times Book Review, Boulevard,
The Journal of Contemporary Fiction
, Double Take
, and Creative Nonfiction'', among others.
Travel Lopate has written for the
New York Times Sophisticated Traveler,
Conde Nast Traveler,
European Travel and Life,
Sidestreets of the World, and
American Way.
Architecture Lopate has written about architecture and urbanism for
Metropolis,
The New York Times,
Double Take,
Preservation,
Cite, and
7 Days, where he wrote a bimonthly architectural column. He has served as a committee member for the
Municipal Art Society and as a consultant for
Ric Burns'
PBS documentary on the history of New York City.
Media critic He has written about movies for
The New York Times,
Vogue,
Esquire,
Film Comment,
Film Quarterly,
Cinemabook,
Threepenny Review,
Tikkun,
American Film,
The Normal School, and the anthology
The Movie That Changed My Life, among others. A volume of his selected movie criticism,
Totally Tenderly Tragically, was published by Doubleday-Anchor in 1998. He edited a massive anthology of American film criticism from the silent era to present day, entitled
American Movie Critics: From Silents Until Now, was published in March 2006 for
Library of America. ==Personal life==